Switzerland from the air

In 1973 FC Zurich won the Swiss Cup Final against FC Basel 2:0 after extra time at Bern’s Wankdorf Stadium. But the game wasn’t interesting just from a sports history point of view – an aerial photograph of the match not only shows the sold-out stadium but also the car park, with its many colourful vehicles from the 1970s. Alongside this unusual historical photograph, the new illustrated book Swissair Aerial Photographs contains 36 colour and 112 black-and-white pictures from the collections of ETH-Bibliothek. The oldest photo dates back to 1918 and the most recent was taken in 1999.

Attraction of aerial photographs

The new book offers something for anyone with an interest in aerial photographs. The rapid urban development and building expansion can be seen in the aerial shots of Zurich main station, Bern city centre and La Chaux-de-Fonds. Other pictures show almost completely undeveloped areas with flowering cherry trees, small-scale agriculture and snow-covered landscapes. Bizarre landscape forms, such as the ice floes on the upper section of Lake Zurich at Bollingen or the flow investigation with green dye in the Rhine, have a certain aesthetic and artistic quality. But it is not just the images of cultural assets, including the amphitheatre at Windisch and Uster Castle, that are exciting from a cultural and historical point of view. The photo of Sihlfeldfriedhof shows that the cemetery was still surrounded by countryside on the edge of the city in 1923 and thus had a significantly different appearance than today. A photo of Lucerne from 1919 shows a castle-like, wooden hall by the lake, which served as a war and peace museum until 1910 and then was later used as a roller-skate rink and a food warehouse, before the space was converted into the KKL Luzern Culture and Congress Centre.

Spoilt for choice

The Swissair Aerial Photography Archive contains about 135,000 pictures, which ETH Bibliothek has been archiving and making accessible over the last few years. The basis of this extensive collection of photographs was formed by the Swiss aviation pioneer Walter Mittelholzer (1894–1937), who took the first images in 1918 and was quick to realise the enormous potential of aerial shots. The author Ruedi Weidmann, with the help of graphic design duo Megi Zumstein and Claudio Barandun, had the difficult task of selecting the most suitable images from 50,000 digitalised aerial photographs for the book. According to the book’s two publishers, Michael Gasser and Nicole Graf from the archive department of ETH Bibliothek, it was important to combine aesthetics with a depiction of the chronological and geographic depth of the collection and a carefully selected image inventory of what has disappeared or appeared over the past decades. It is the fourth book that the two publishers have released in the series ‘Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the Image Archive, ETH Bibliothek’ (see box).

Help needed for identification

In addition to making its image collections available to the public in the form of illustrated books, ETH-Bibliothek also works hard on archive processing and digitalisation. The project to process the Swissair Aerial Photography Archive, particularly the digitalisation, will be completed during the course of the next year; some 60,000 photos can already be accessed in the online Image Archive. The help of the public is also needed in their description, as 650 photos have not yet been fully identified. They are part of a series of images of industrial buildings taken in the 1920s and 1930s at very low altitude. Graf explains: “These photographs form part of a very special, forgotten collection. Because some of the factories and industrial buildings no longer exist, the images provide important and irreplaceable evidence of Swiss industrialisation.”